


The Colors I Choose

by groveofbones



Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: Family, Family Bonding, Family Feels, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Let K Be Happy 2k49, Memories, Parenthood, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 10:32:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17579201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groveofbones/pseuds/groveofbones
Summary: Rick Deckard had never thought of himself as the kind of man who could be a father. So it was startling, decades after he had lost his only child, to suddenly find himself a father of two.Or, Deckard and Ana find K in the snow and take him with them.





	The Colors I Choose

Rick Deckard had never thought of himself as the kind of man who could be a father, even when he had been young. He had thought of himself as a bastard, a killer, a hard man doing the hard jobs, but never as a potential father.

 

Then again, he hadn’t really thought of himself as a potential lover, either. Rachael had changed that. Something about her had made him want to be… not different, exactly. Clarified, a version of himself that had been pared down, the bruises and residue left by the job scraped away until he was an essence of himself, until only the essential things were left.

 

She had made it seem like it was possible. Those few happy years on the run with her, he had thought every day about the danger they were in, about the things he might have to do to protect them, but there were days, sometimes two or three in a row, when he didn’t think, even once, about the old job, about the things he’d done, the things he’d been. Sometimes he thought sadly of Batty and his crew, sometimes he even woke up in a cold sweat from dreams about them or about any of the hundreds of others.

 

But there were days when he didn’t think about it at all. He only thought about Rachael, and himself, and the allies they were finding they could count on, and the days ahead of them. He’d had good days, then.

 

And when they’d found, to their astonishment, that Rachael was pregnant, well, for a moment, for those far-too-short months, he’d thought he could be a father, too.

 

After, when Rachael was in the ground and their daughter had been spirited away to some hiding place, when even the thought that he probably would never see his child again wasn’t big enough to drown out the knowledge that he’d never see Rachael again, he decided that he had been so, so unbelievably stupid.

 

He had gone back to thinking of himself as the kind of man who could never be a father. So it was startling, decades after he had lost his only child, to suddenly find himself a father of two.

 

***

 

They had raided everything health-related from Ana’s facility; after all, her condition might have been exaggerated to provide an excuse to keep her a recluse, to keep her out of sight, but she had still spent a couple decades without building up the immunities she could have gotten in the outside world. She’d spend a lot of time getting sick before she got better. They’d need all the medicine they could get.

 

As they walked out of the building, Deckard was alternating between planning for how he would take care of Ana when she was sick and getting distracted by her arm threaded through his, by the fact that he was breathing the same air as his _daughter_ and he hadn’t seen her since she was a single day old.

 

He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw K lying on the steps, his face turned beatifically up to the sky, eyes closed and skin pale. Blood was spotting the snow around him, slipping through his slack fingers as they rested on his side.

 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Deckard said vehemently, and hurried over to get down on his knees next to K, feeling snow and blood soak through the knees of his pants. He pulled a first-aid kit out of the little bundle they’d packed.

 

Ana stared at K, her eyes wide, for a moment, but she didn’t say anything, just knelt beside Deckard with no hesitation.

 

“What happened?” she asked.

 

Deckard pulled K’s hand away from his body, staring at the wound. The blood didn’t seem to be moving sluggishly, which was bad. The wound was deep enough that it wouldn’t clot and scab over on its own.

 

“Looks like a stab wound,” Deckard answered, scowling at the memory of that other replicant, Luv, swiping at K with her knife. “He must have kept it hidden under his stupid coat. Idiot.” Deckard flipped open the kit and pulled out bandages and an anti-shock hypo. “He’s lost a lot of blood by now.”

 

Ana, apparently, didn’t even need to ask what to do; she put her hands down on either side of the wound, applying pressure and keeping the edges as close together as possible as Deckard maneuvered the bandage down. There was a soft hiss as the bandage compressed itself, closing the wound and releasing clotting agents. Deckard put the hypo against K’s neck and triggered the injection.

 

“What now?” Ana asked.

 

He glanced at her, her hands covered in blood and her face determined. She had just walked out of a spun-glass cage and into a battleground, and hadn’t even blinked before getting to work. Deckard suddenly loved her so much it almost hurt.

 

“We’ve got to get him out of the cold, it’s not doing him any favors. Although it might have slowed the process of bleeding out. I think I know someone who can do a better job of stitching him up.”

 

Between the two of them, they levered K up and carried him down to the steps and into the car. Deckard kept glancing at the place where he’d put the bandage, hoping it held and that the jostling didn’t do something worse to K internally. 

 

Finally, they set him into one of the seats, and Deckard moved to the controls to put in the address.

 

He heard a small groan and glanced over his shoulder into the back of the car.

 

K’s brow was furrowed, his eyelids fluttering slightly. He looked blearily up at Ana, who was leaning over him.

 

“Don’t worry,” Ana said softly. “It’ll be alright.” She put a hand to the side of K’s head, and K leaned against it, looking aimlessly at the back of Deckard’s seat in front of him.

 

Deckard thought, suddenly, of being trapped, handcuffed and afraid, and watching K throw himself into the fight as if he didn’t care what happened to himself, as long as he could protect Deckard.

 

Ana sat beside K and strapped herself into her seat, his perfect tiny daughter all grown up, her hand still brushing gently against K’s hair.

 

Deckard suddenly loved _both_ of them so much that it hurt. He had to turn his eyes forward again to catch his breath.

 

***

 

Freysa and her people weren’t exactly happy to see them, but then, that made sense. With all of Wallace’s power and attention turned toward the question of whether Replicants could be doing things they weren’t programmed to do, the little cells of Replicant independence and resistance were going under for the moment, and Freysa had expected that Deckard would take Ana and do the same.

 

“Don’t you understand what your daughter means?” Freysa asked sharply, pulling Deckard aside to whisper to him. “What she means to us? You have to get her someplace safe.”

 

“I know that. And I will. But K isn’t going to survive without help, and I didn’t know where else I could take a rogue Replicant to get a stab wound fixed up.”

 

Ana waited just far enough away that it wasn’t obvious she was listening in, but her attention was fixed on Deckard and Freysa. She held her hands clasped together in front of her so that everyone could see the blood on them, as if daring the Replicants to refuse K their help when Ana had been trying her best to save him. 

 

Finally, Freysa sighed and nodded. “We’ll do what we can, but we don’t have much time. I’m not sure we can take a wounded man with us, we need to be able to move freely and quickly.”

 

“That’s alright,” Deckard said, and glanced at Ana. He hadn’t been entirely certain, up to that point, that he was going to say it, but he abruptly realized that there wasn’t anything else he could possibly do. “He’s coming with us.”

 

Freysa gestured to three of her people, who headed out to where Deckard had parked the car, where they’d left K asleep on the seat as they’d hurried in to beg for his life.

 

Ana turned to watch them go, following them to the door of the little underground chamber, resting a bloody hand on the concrete wall and looking after the men’s retreating backs with worry on her face.

 

“He wanted to be your son, you know,” Freysa said, softly. “He had hoped that he was your child.”

 

“What did you tell him?”

 

“I told him that it’s what we all wanted. To be special. To be something unlike anything else.”

 

Deckard nodded absently at her words. His thoughts turned toward a night years before, the rain soaking into his clothes and the pain of his broken fingers and the fear of what might happen to him eating away at his ability to think. He remembered Batty’s face, his searching, longing eyes, his voice as he spilled out the bits and pieces of his life, desperately hoping that Deckard would keep some part of him alive.

 

Freysa’s men returned, holding K gently between them, and Ana stepped out of the doorway to let them in, tugging nervously on her sleeves and not taking her eyes away from K’s still face. She stepped to Deckard’s side, and, after a moment where Deckard wasn’t sure what to do, he hesitantly put an arm around her shoulders. Just as hesitantly, she leaned against him.

 

Deckard watched the Replicants lay K down on a table and start taking out bits and bobs of cobbled-together medical equipment. He watched, and he thought of tears in rain.

 

***

 

Decades before, when Freysa had been and gone, taking tiny newborn Ana off into hiding; when all traces of Rachael had been scrubbed from the little farmhouse, and her body given to the ground; when Deckard had finally stood under the spreading tree, a speck against the vast gray sky, and accepted that maybe alone was just the way he was made to be; at that moment, Sapper, massive but painfully earnest, had come to stand next to him and offered him a cup of coffee.

 

Deckard had taken it without thinking. It might as well have just been hot water for all he could taste it.

 

“Don’t give up hope,” Sapper said quietly, looking at the freshly turned earth instead of at Deckard. “Just… don’t give up. We have to get Ana somewhere safe, but… Someday, maybe it will be safe everywhere, for us. You’ll see her again. You will.”

 

Perhaps, if Deckard had still been the man that Rachael had made him, he would have done what Sapper suggested and kept his hope. But as soon as Rachael had died, all that clarity he had found with her had slipped away, and he’d clouded over into the same old Deckard again. The same collection of bruises and hurts and weight and exhaustion.

 

He had put a hand on Sapper’s shoulder and forced a smile. “Yes,” he’d said, “someday, I will.” He’d left Sapper like that, thinking that his words had worked, because Sapper had been gentle with Rachael at the end and Deckard figured he owed the man that much.

 

But as soon as Sapper’s farm was out of sight, Deckard let the smile slip from his face. He knew that nothing would ever be safe, and he knew that he would never see his daughter again.

 

***

 

Just as soon as it was safe to move K, they maneuvered him back into the car, nodded farewell to Freysa, and headed out of the city. Ana sat in the front, next to Deckard, this time, but she kept sneaking glances into the back seat. 

 

Freysa had given Deckard a list of car routes out of the city that the Replicants had found were less observed, just out of the sight of most of the stationary cameras. Deckard reviewed the routes and chose what he thought was the most likely one, and hoped for the best. As they set off, Deckard ran through his knowledge of the places they could hide. Vegas was out of the question now, but there were still a few possible spots to lie low within the range of the car.

 

He thought with a pang about that good old mutt who’d kept him company and looked after him in Vegas. He hoped the poor thing would be alright, would be able to take care of itself with Deckard gone. Wallace would surely have people watching his old hideout, though. There was no going back.

 

He and Ana flew in silence for a while. Now that they weren’t distracted by the tears that had come first and the frantic activity to save K that had come second, there was a tension between them. The silence wasn’t comfortable. Deckard wanted to break it, but he wasn’t sure how to begin. 

 

At last, as he watched her shift out of the corner of his eye, turning to look in the backseat and then facing forward again, she said in a small voice, “He came to see me. He has one of my memories. I think I… tricked him into thinking it was really his. That he was… like me.”

 

Deckard’s first thought was that, if he understood anything about the job she’d had, she wasn’t supposed to give real memories away, especially not her own. He didn’t say that, though. Instead he cleared his throat, tightened and relaxed his hands on the controls of the car, and asked, “What was the memory?” His own voice was soft, softer than he had intended; the whole car had taken on the kind of semi-sacred hush he’d only known in the wild places, far away from cities.

 

Ana started talking, hesitantly at first but getting more and more confident as she went on. She paused often, and Deckard didn’t interrupt her, didn’t interject, and the pace of her words sped up and up, as if she had been waiting a long time to tell her story. To talk to anyone at all, maybe.

 

She described the orphanages of her early life, and Deckard couldn’t reconcile the frightened, underfed, scrappy girl darting over lit furnaces and hiding from the bigger kids with the nights he himself had spent with Rachael during her pregnancy, talking about the child they’d have, the songs they’d sing to her, the games they’d play with her, the things they’d do together. The discrepancy was agonizing.

 

Then she described being adopted, being comfortable for the first time in her life, about the long years of lonely comfort in her sealed rooms. That ached in a completely different way, leaving an entirely different bruise behind.

 

“And then… You came.” Ana stuttered to a stop, not looking at him, her hands twisting around each other in her lap.

 

There were a lot of emotions swirling around Deckard’s head, but he’d never been particularly good at words, at least not where his feelings were concerned. Instead, he nodded and said, “I did,” and hoped that would stand in for the nebulous things he couldn’t say.

 

“How…” Ana stopped, then glanced up at him and away again. She waved a hand through the air in front of herself, a gesture as if to encompass all of her. “How?”

 

Deckard felt a rush of adrenaline, his heart slamming against his ribs, and he tightened his grip on the steering wheel again. The walls of the car seemed to be moving in; there wasn’t room for that question. There wasn’t room in the world for that question. 

 

How could he possibly answer it? How could he talk about her? How could he talk about the hope he had had for a brief moment and lost, the watery gray sky of the morning under the tree where they’d put the woman who had made him clear again? How could he talk about the car disappearing, a dot in that cold sky, carrying away the child he had thought, for a foolish instant, he could belong to?

 

But Ana had nothing of her mother except his memories, and Rachael had nothing of her daughter or anything else at all, and both of them deserved better. This was not the time to be a coward, he thought sternly to himself.

 

He cleared his throat again and began. He didn’t tell a story, he mostly rambled, a disjointed, choppy mess, jumping forward and back in time, but he told her everything he could about Rachael, about what they had meant to each other, about what Ana would have meant to them if they could have all stayed together.

 

And Ana, when he worked up the courage to look at her, was hanging on his every word.

 

The longer he talked, the easier it got. The less it felt like the words were being dragged out of him and leaving damage behind. It was like working an atrophied muscle, slowly but surely repairing what had crumbled with disuse. He realized that it was the first time he had talked about Rachael, about the good times they’d had together, since she’d died.

 

The conversation took hours. It was less of a conversation, really, than a pair of monologues, but it meant something to Deckard. He hoped it meant something to Ana, too. At any rate, when he finally trailed off, having told everything that he thought he could, they were well beyond the city, and the silence that fell was a bit more comfortable than it had been.

 

Deckard pointed the car northeast. Much of Northern California was taken up by Greater San Francisco’s urban sprawl, but there were some forested areas inland, and he knew that there had once been a compound occupied by anti-corporate radicals. They had long since been burned out and exterminated by a multi-company police force (that had itself been outlawed and wiped out by a power shift in Los Angeles and San Francisco), but Deckard was hoping that there would be enough buildings still standing, and enough resources still socked away, that they could rest there for a few days, at least.

 

Deckard was just angling the car for a final approach when he heard a soft, quickly stifled sound from the backseat. He glanced in the car’s mirror and saw K, holding himself very still, his eyes narrow and moving quickly to take in his surroundings. It was such a familiar attitude that it made Deckard tense up just seeing it. 

 

It was the way he’d woken up every morning for so long. The snap from sleep to wakefulness, the wariness as he checked to make sure he wasn’t in immediate danger. Deckard remembered from his own days as a Blade Runner the nervous energy that suffused him at work and followed him home, like a heavy coat he couldn’t take off. 

 

“You’re safe,” he said in a quiet voice, and watched K’s eyes swing forward toward him. “Are you in pain?”

 

“Yes,” K said simply. Wincing, he moved one hand to touch gently at the wound on his side.

 

“Don’t, don’t mess with that,” Ana said, turning in her seat to look back at him. “It’s been patched up and bandaged, but be careful with it anyway.”

 

Deckard could have told Ana that the movement wasn’t the sort of aimless touching of painful spots that another person would have done. K was hovering his hand over his side protectively, just in case something became a threat.

 

But K just smiled wanly and nodded toward Ana. 

 

Ana stared at him for a long moment. Deckard watched her out of the corner of her eye. Finally she smiled and said, “Don’t worry. We’re going to be alright.”

 

Deckard felt his heart jump. He couldn’t guarantee that they would be alright. But he wanted to. 

 

***

 

The entrance to the compound was in a stand of trees, where it was covered from surveillance from above. Deckard touched the car down in a nearby clearing, and immediately hurried Ana out of the car so she could help him get K out. 

 

“Come on,” Deckard said, trying to strike some balance between gentle and firm. “We’ve got to get out of the open quick as we can.”

 

Ana nodded determinedly, one of K’s arms over her shoulder.

 

The hatch stuck when Deckard pulled at it, and for a terrifying second he thought it would be rusted completely shut, and he’d have to come up with somewhere else for them to hide.

 

But then, finally, with a teeth-gritting shriek, it came open. Deckard gestured Ana and K into the sloping hallway beyond and half-shut the hatch over them. Then he backtracked to where he’d left the car, moving it closer to the shadow of the trees and covering it over with as many fallen branches and leaves as he could pull together. It wouldn’t stand up to any determined searching, but there wasn’t any reason for Wallace or anyone else to come looking here, so hopefully they’d be alright.

 

When he came back through the hatch and closed it behind him, Ana and K were leaning against the wall, waiting for him.

 

Ana’s eyes were wide, nervous, and K’s were intensely watchful. The weight of their stares hit him like a physical blow. 

 

For so long, he hadn’t wanted anything besides to live another day, to scrape together enough food to avoid hunger, to take care of his dog. To not lose the memories he valued the most, even as his body and his mind aged. His desires had been so simple, so small.

 

Now he wanted so much more than that. He wanted to keep both of them safe, which would be so difficult that it was nearly impossible. 

 

Such a huge change, in such a short time. It made him dizzy. 

 

“Come on,” he said. “There should be something to eat. I’m hoping.”

 

***

 

Deckard had been born in LA. His parents had talked about the world outside the big cities, places where there were still growing things, as if they were a dream. He hadn’t ever been entirely certain, growing up, whether they’d been beyond the city limits at all. 

 

The decades of environmental catastrophe had left big stretches of the country, of every country, depleted and changed from the way they used to be. People said that the world had once been lush and green, dramatic and beautiful. 

 

Even if that wasn’t true anymore, Deckard had still been completely amazed when he’d first left the city. Rachael had been, too, and they’d traveled for days without worrying about where they were going, just taking in the experience of having no one else in sight, of hearing the sounds of animals and none of the sounds of machinery, of finding places with completely unobstructed views of the sky. 

 

But the two things that had been the most astonishing, and unsettling, were the silence and the darkness. Deckard had thought he knew what it meant for a place to be silent or dark, but he had had no idea. The first few nights, he and Rachael had clung to each other, feeling as though their skin was crawling and completely unable to sleep, unconsciously trying to find the sounds and lights of the city. 

 

Deckard couldn’t tell what it made him feel to watch Ana discover the same exhilarated discomfort. To be honest, he had felt so much that day that he was starting to feel a little numb. 

 

The compound was freezing, so they’d dragged every piece of cloth or cushion into the central room, piling them all up into a kind of nest, and turned on the ancient heating system for that room only. The freezer had long since broken down, so the freeze-dried prepared meals had all gone bad, but there were enough cans of various things to make a decent meal. 

 

They sat together in a circle and spooned tasteless mush out of cans and into their mouths, and the silence was strange and awkward, but Deckard couldn’t bring himself to mind. He kept looking over at Ana, wondering what he could see in her face that would remind him of Rachael, or, an unsettling thought, of himself. Then he would look over at K and see that, although he was still obviously in pain, the color was starting to return to his face, and he was wolfing down his food. 

 

He had no idea what he could or should say, but it didn’t seem to matter. He was content. 

 

He wasn’t sure he felt clarified, the way he once had with Rachael, but he felt the flaws and cracks in the glass of himself less keenly. 

 

When he was finished eating, he set aside the last can, cleared his throat, and said, “We should get some sleep. We’ll try to head out in the morning. Find somewhere else to hole up.”

 

K nodded at the words. “You’ll want to keep moving.” His mouth was turned down at the corner, a hint of unhappiness marring his face. He would know, just as Deckard knew, the mistakes people made when they were trying to run. He would have taken advantage of as many of those mistakes as Deckard had. He would have killed as many people as Deckard had.

 

“Yes,” Deckard said. “ _We_ will.”

 

***

 

Deckard had gotten so used to solitude that sleeping in the same room as someone else was almost uncomfortable. He tried to tell himself that the breathing he was hearing, the sniffs and shifts of sleeping people, was no different than all those nights with his dog on the floor beside his bed, keeping him company. 

 

It was different, though. He was sleeping back-to-back with his daughter, his child, that person he’d once dreamed of but had forced himself not to think of for so many years.

 

On her other side was a man who had searched him out, saved his life, reunited him with Ana. A man he had made the choice to care for. 

 

It kept him awake for a very long time, staring into the darkness and trying to figure out what he was supposed to think at that moment, how to untangle all the things he was feeling. 

 

So, because he couldn’t seem to sleep, he started to plan their next steps, thinking through every place he knew about or had heard about where they could stay for a while. The reach of the companies, Tyrell and his kind, was long, but it had to end somewhere. 

 

He thought and thought until he finally drifted off, and with each thought he became more determined to protect the two people at his back.

 

***

 

They didn’t head out in the morning. 

 

Deckard woke up to Ana attempting to kick all the blankets off herself. He raised himself up on one elbow and looked at her. “What are you doing?”

 

She looked back at him with glazed eyes, her face pale but slick with sweat. “It’s hot,” she mumbled, clumsily waving a foot to try to extricate it from the blankets. 

 

“Hey, hang on,” he said, sitting up and grabbing the blanket before she get it too far away from her. “You’re sick. I know you feel hot, but you should keep this on.”

 

She mumbled something incomprehensible. He draped the blanket back over her, hoping she wouldn’t just kick it off again. She made a frustrated sound and glared at him, then very pointedly pulled her arms out from under the blanket and laid them on top, instead. He sighed and let it go.

 

K hadn’t woken up yet, apparently. He thought that, as a Blade Runner, K probably naturally slept pretty lightly, but he had made sure K took a few painkillers the night before. Deckard slid out of the blanket nest, wincing at the early morning cold, and went over to K’s side to check on him.

 

K was curled up on his side with his hands up in front of his face, and his entire body was tense. Deckard frowned and put a hand on K’s shoulder, shaking him gently. “Hey, K. Kid, wake up.”

 

K made a soft, frightened sound, and Deckard raised his voice a little bit. “K. You’re dreaming. Wake up.” 

 

K’s eyes snapped open at the movement and he tried to sit up, only to fall back onto his back with a hiss of pain.

 

“Careful, careful!” Deckard said, alarmed. 

 

“Cells,” K whispered, his eyes unfocused and staring at a point over Deckard’s shoulder, clearly still caught up in whatever he’d been dreaming about. “Cells.”

 

Deckard sighed and pushed himself to his feet. “You’re okay, K. Do you know where you are?”

 

K blinked at him, then looked around. Deckard watched his eyes sharpen as he came out of his dream and became aware of what was around him. 

 

“I’m awake,” K said quietly. “I’m awake, sir.”

 

Deckard ignored that “sir” and patted K awkwardly on the shoulder, then reached over to pat Ana’s shoulder, too, hoping it would provide some kind of reassurance. “Both of you, stay there,” he said. “Give me a second.”

 

He hadn’t expected Ana to get sick so quickly, but it made sense. And K had been near death the day before. It had been stupid of Deckard to just assume they’d be able to move on right away. Neither of them were in any fit state to travel. He retrieved the first aid kit from where he’d stashed it and made his way back to Ana and K.

 

Simple things, things he could do almost without thinking. Sort through the medicines in the kit, check the recommended dosages, pain pills for K, fever reducers for Ana, note the cough medicine and decongestants in case she needed them later. Water in two tin mugs scrounged up from the compound’s kitchen, make sure both took their pills. 

 

Wrap the blankets back around Ana, even though it made her groan and glare at him. Tell her that she just needed to get some rest, drink a lot of water, and stay warm. 

 

Help K sit up, pull the old bandages away, disinfect the wound, unwrap the new bandages. Tell him that he just needed to stay as still as possible, get some rest, drink a lot of water, and stay warm.

 

Simple things. Step-by-step things. Things that made him feel as if he could handle caring for them, after all. He could break the massive, terrifying task in front of him down into little, simple things, doing them one at a time, wrenching back control of the situation until he no longer felt like he was standing on the edge of a cliff.

 

“Freysa’s people did a good job,” he said conversationally to K. “Looks like it’s healing well.”

 

K, who was more lucid now but seemed quiet and shaken, stared down at where Deckard’s hands moved across his torso, eyes wide. He was probably used to patching himself up, or to being knocked out while some biotechnician went to work on him.

 

When Deckard had been a Blade Runner, he hadn’t been used to gentle touches, either.

 

“I feel… bad,” Ana said, and Deckard paused in his work to look at her. Apparently, heat had been replaced with cold, and she was holding the blankets tightly around her. She looked groggily at him. “Am I okay? Will I be okay?”

 

“Yeah, you’ll be fine. Just a cold. Your body’ll get used to it soon.” Deckard hoped he was right. He carefully placed the last bit of body tape to keep K’s bandage in place and sat back on his heels. “There.”

 

“You brought me with you.” K’s voice was very quiet, and he didn’t meet Deckard’s eyes.

 

Deckard sighed and shrugged. “You saved my life.”

 

K looked up then. Deckard didn’t look away from his stare. Whatever it was K was looking for on Deckard’s face, he seemed to find it, because he nodded and sat back against the wall. “Thank you,” he said.

 

Deckard put a hand on his shoulder. Then he brushed the sweaty hair out of Ana’s face. Then he stood up and said, “I’m going to go check on the car. Stay here and stay warm.”

 

He headed back to the hatch and out into the chilly morning air. 

 

Ana and K had both leaned toward him when he’d touched them. 

 

His throat felt tight, and his eyes were stinging.

 

***

 

Outside, he scanned the sky then walked around a little bit until he found a small hill that could give him a better view. He didn’t see anything out there, nothing on the horizon, so he took himself back to the clearing and looked at the car appraisingly. He spent a little time moving the camouflage around, making sure it really would hold. It wasn’t perfect, but it wouldn’t draw attention, either. 

 

He was starting to think they’d actually made it out of the city without being followed or tracked, but he couldn’t get complacent yet. Maybe not ever.

 

Finally, he decided that the car was as well-hidden as he could make it. On his way back, he gathered an armful of wood. He wasn’t confident enough in the ventilation of the compound to feel completely comfortable lighting a fire, but he also had no idea how long the ancient heating system would work. He might have to improvise at some point. 

 

All around him were the sounds of a forest waking up, birds and things scurrying on the ground and insects buzzing and plants rustling as they were bumped or blown around. 

 

He was paying so much attention to those noises that it took him a while to realize that he’d been humming something as he gathered branches and twigs. 

 

He stopped dead in his tracks when he realized what it was that he was humming.

 

***

 

“Do you know any songs?” Rachael had asked him suddenly one night. She had only just started to show, and was fascinated with the round bump of her stomach, keeping her hands over it almost unconsciously. 

 

“Songs?” Deckard had asked.

 

“You know,” Rachael said, wrapping her arms around herself. “For the baby.”

 

Deckard had rolled toward her. They were on a cot in the guest room of a rundown farmhouse whose owner had appreciated Deckard’s help for a few days bringing in his crop and hadn’t wanted to ask any questions. The room wasn’t heated, so he’d made Rachael wear his coat and they’d bundled together under the threadbare blankets the old farmer had provided. Deckard took one of her hands in his and thought about the question, staring out the bubbling glass of the window across from them at the moon. 

 

He’d heard a lot of lullabies, of course. Every year, for Christmas and all the other big shopping seasons, companies would roll out their newest ones, packaged up to echo tinnily out of the speakers of mobiles and stuffed animals and whatever else, trying to attract the attention of new parents who wanted the perfect thing to put their baby to sleep. He thought there’d been over a hundred lullabies released the last year, alone.

 

But he didn’t think that was what Rachael was talking about.

 

So he’d just leaned down to kiss her fingers and said, “I don’t. Do you?”

 

She thought about it for a long time. Then she said, “There was one. My mother used to sing it to me, when I was very small. It was an antique, probably a half a century or older. I thought it was special because it was so old, like it was a treasure only me and my mother had. A stupid thing to think, anyone could have looked up the song.” She shrugged. She smiled, but it looked wrong on her face, looked wrong for the moment. “It wasn’t real, anyway. None of it was real.”

 

“It will be,” Deckard said, suddenly nervous. “It will be when you sing it to him. Or her. It’ll all be real.”

 

Rachael didn’t say anything at first, and he looked up at her, scared that he’d made it worse. But her smile was more genuine, brighter, and she squeezed his hand. Somehow, despite the fact that he was sure he wasn’t cut out to be a lover, a partner, he’d managed to say the right thing at the right moment.

 

He pushed his luck, just a little bit, leaning his head against her shoulder and saying, “You should teach me the words.”

 

And she had. She had leaned back against the pillows and run her fingers through his hair, and sang him that song from half a century ago, and he had rested his hand on her stomach and listened to the sound of her voice. She had made him feel like a new man, a simpler man.

 

She had made him feel so _clear_.

 

***

 

He stared at the rust on the hatch, at the wood he was carrying in his arms, and shut his eyes tight against the memory. 

 

Then he leaned down and opened the hatch and swung himself back into the compound.

 

As he closed the hatch behind him and carefully piled the wood beside it, he heard voices from further in. Or rather, Ana’s voice, with the occasional soft, murmured response from K.

 

He paused at the entrance to the central room, just to listen for a moment. Ana and K were sitting up beside each other, backs to the wall, each wrapped in a few blankets. K had his eyes half shut, head tilted as he listened, and Ana was waving one hand lazily through the air, as if to punctuate her story.

 

“No, don’t laugh at me, you can’t,” Ana was saying. Her voice sounded tired, but a bit more alert; the fever reducers must have had an effect.

 

“I’m not laughing,” K answered, sounding amused. “Did you fall down?”

 

“Of course I fell down, I was twenty-one and clumsy and had just stepped on the hem of my own skirt. But falling down wasn’t the worst part.”

 

“Oh no?”

 

“No. Because my skirt had a loose waistband.”

 

“Oh, no.”

 

“Yeah, so my skirt came down and I was on the floor with a bruise forming on my hip, in my underwear, in front of a woman I was really trying to show that I was a competent professional memory designer.” K actually did laugh softly at that. Ana shook her head ruefully and said, “I suppose I’ll let you laugh. It’s only fair.”

 

“She didn’t laugh, did she?” K asked.

 

“No, she made very concerned sounds and asked if I needed a medic and very kindly did not mention that my underwear was bright purple. But after that I made sure I was always wearing pants when she came to consult with me.”

 

K made a mock-serious face and nodded solemnly. “Might have been a good idea.”

 

“Yeah.” Ana’s smile slipped a bit. “I was worried at first that she wouldn’t ever come back, and I’d have to work with someone else on the project team. But she did come back. I think… I think I may have been a little in love with her. It was the first time I’d felt that way about anyone.”

 

K had gone very still beside her, his face a polite mask. “What happened?”

 

Ana shrugged. “The project finished, she got assigned to a new one. She didn’t come back after that. I could have said something to her, I guess, about how I felt, but it’s hard to have a relationship through glass.” She shook her head and made a chopping motion through the air with her hand, banishing the memory the same way Deckard had on the forest floor above. She turned to K with somewhat false cheer and said, “Have you ever been in love?”

 

“Yeah. Once.” K had bent his head to stare at the floor. “She, um… She died.”

 

“Oh.” Ana looked away from him, and her smile vanished completely. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

 

Deckard watched them, his heart clenched like a fist, and inside him was that rusted-over place that he couldn’t quite open yet. He ground his teeth together, his mind whirling. Their pain felt like a weight across his shoulders that he couldn’t shake off.

 

K looked around, and saw Deckard in the doorway. He nodded and said, “Mr. Deckard.”

 

Deckard sighed and shrugged his shoulders, trying to dislodge the heavy feeling. “Come on, kid. You kept me from getting stabbed by Tyrell’s little company bot, and I dragged your bloody ass out of the snow. You can call me Rick.”

 

K smiled a little bit, his big expressive eyes crinkling at the corners, and Ana turned to grin at Deckard.

 

Deckard cleared his throat and asked, “You two feeling okay for the moment?” At their nods, he continued, “I’m going to see if the stove in the kitchen is working. You should have something hot. Yell at me if you need anything.”

 

“Thank you, um… Rick,” Ana said, stumbling a bit over the words. Deckard nodded stoically. That was fine, that was fair… He probably wasn’t ready to be called anything else just yet, anyway. It hurt a little bit, but… It was fine. It was fair. He hadn’t been there, after all. 

 

The stove, it turned out, did work. He found a pot, washed the dust out with some of the water from the sealed containers, and dumped a few cans of soup in. A search of some drawers disclosed a silicone spoon that didn’t look too much the worse for wear, and he stood over the stove and stirred. 

 

Half of his mind was still full of the melody and the lyrics of a song that he had been taught a long time ago, that he had very carefully not thought of for decades.

 

The other half was still listening to the two people in the other room.

 

They were quiet for a long time. Finally, Ana offered, “It’s been a really long time since I’ve eaten something that wasn’t run through a sanitizer before it was delivered to me.”

 

After a thoughtful pause, K said, “I’ve never eaten anything that wasn’t the cheapest freeze-dried meal from the corner store.”

 

“Well,” Ana said, a bit of weak cheer in her voice, “this should be good, then.”

 

Deckard looked down at the gloopy, mass-produced, decade-old soup in the pot. It wouldn’t be good, probably. Although hunger was the best flavoring. He just hoped he didn’t disappoint them too much. 

 

He stirred, calmly and slowly, and hummed to himself as he listened.

 

“Are you feeling any better?” K asked.

 

“Mmmm,” Ana made a thoughtful sound. “I guess. It’s strange, I must have gotten sick at the orphanage all the time, but it’s been so long I forgot how it felt. But I’m definitely feeling better than this morning.”

 

“That’s good.” K’s voice was tense and falsely casual. “You and Mr…. You and Rick will need to get moving as soon as possible. Just because you’re out of the city doesn’t mean you’re out of their reach. I found Rick in Las Vegas.”

 

There was another long silence. Finally, Ana asked, “What will you do? When we leave here?”

 

“I… I don’t know.” K’s answer sounded small. 

 

“Is there anywhere you want to go?”

 

“No.”

 

“Well…” Ana trailed off. 

 

Deckard kept stirring, and humming, and listening. He reflected, distantly, detachedly, that he was a coward, letting Ana struggle to say what he wanted to say, but he was still moving through this suddenly new life as if he was trying to navigate a minefield. He had lost the ability to be the man he had once been, for those brief years that he had been happy, and he was desperately hoping he could get it back. 

 

“You could come with us,” Ana finally said, in a rush, her words running together. 

 

“I… Yeah, um, if you want. I can help defend you. But it will take a while for me to be healed up.”

 

“No,” Ana said, “that’s not what I meant. I mean, you… You have one of my memories. One of the important ones.”

 

“I… I don’t understand.”

 

“You have part of me. And you saved my father’s life, and you brought us together even though you didn’t have to. Even though you almost died. I think you should come with us because I think that’s where you belong.”

 

K didn’t answer in words, but Deckard heard a sighing sound, as if a held breath had been expelled, as if a great weight had been lifted off K’s shoulders. Deckard thought, again, of those first days with Rachael, of the sudden knowledge that he wouldn’t have to be a Blade Runner again, that he’d left behind his life of killing and barely escaping with his life. That he had someone who cared about him. 

 

There was silence from the other room as the soup started to bubble, as Deckard took it off the heat and found a few bowls and spoons, cleaned them off and filled them up. 

 

He made his way back into the other room. Ana had leaned back against the wall, her eyes shut and her breathing thick and punctuated occasionally by coughs. K was sitting very still and watching her out of the corner of his eye. 

 

He looked up when Deckard walked in. He handed K a bowl and said, gruffly, “If it’s what you want, you could come with us when we move out.”

 

“See?” Ana whispered, apparently not entirely asleep, and she opened her eyes and took her own bowl from Deckard’s hands. She smiled at him, and it made his chest ache.

 

He went back to the kitchen for his own bowl and settled himself across the room from them, so he could keep an eye on them, evaluate them. It had been enough time since they’d woken up; he should make sure both of them took more medicine. 

 

The same song still echoed through his head, that song he’d been taught by someone he loved so long ago, the song he’d thought he would sing to his own child.

 

_Deep greens and blues_

_Are the colors I choose_

_Won’t you let me go down in my dreams_

_And rockabye sweet baby James_

 

Somewhere in his mind, the hatch opened at last, the rusted hinges creaking and cracking, the door swinging up, and his feelings poured out so quickly that they were almost overwhelming. Finally, he could admit to himself what he was seeing in front of him, on the other side of the room. 

 

They were his children. He had his children with him. 

 

Nearly three decades after he’d lost the hope that he could be a father, he had become one at last. 

 

He realized that he recognized the feeling that was slowly suffusing his veins. He felt… _clear_. 


End file.
